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NEWS

Stricter penalties for failure to list financial statements in the collection of instruments


12/4/2019

The Chamber of Deputies will start the first reading of a major amendment to the Business Corporations Act, which also includes an amendment to the Act on Public Registers. It is proposed to introduce stricter consequences for companies failing to meet their obligation to submit their financial statements for filing in the collection of instruments. The amendment primarily targets business corporations without any economic activity which only exist formally and are often primarily used for tax fraud. Therefore, the plan is to impose sanctions for those business corporations which fail to submit a regular or an interim financial statement for at least 2 consecutive accounting periods to be incorporated into the collection of instruments, while also failing to request remedy by the court. In such cases, the Registration Court will initiate a dissolution procedure for that business corporation. Currently, the failure to submit financial statements to the collection mostly means risking a fine of up to CZK 100,000, the dissolution procedure being reserved for extreme cases. The wording of the draft amendment makes it clear that in the end, the tightening of sanctions will not only apply to inactive business corporations but to all which fail to meet their obligations in a timely and appropriate manner.